To run a business and meet increasingly demanding international standards, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and International Accounting Standards (IAS) 2005, multi-site and international organizations (i.e., parent or global entities) must get a consolidated view of information (e.g., financial data) from their subsidiaries, member or local organizations, or the like. At the same time, each member organization may have to answer to national and/or local governmental standards and reporting requirements. These diverse business intelligence, analytic, and reporting needs and requirements often result in an inefficient and error-prone workflow. For example, subsidiaries must take financial information out of their local systems and reenter it into a spreadsheet or system provided by their parent organization. In addition, this workflow must be repeated by each subsidiary before the parent company can consolidate it into one financial report.
Several options exist on the market today that can be used to create and perhaps manage relationships between individuals and organizations. Some prior data management systems have the ability to allow a user to create many-to-many relationships as well as hierarchical relationships via custom user interfaces. However, these prior user interfaces may be limited in terms of supplying hints and visual representations as to the nature of the organization hierarchy in question and more often require textual references to make associations and/or disassociations. Furthermore, modern and legacy solutions may interact directly with a single type of database only. Moreover, they often offer limited services and protection to users to prevent them from inadvertently creating invalid relationships in relation to other stored relationships (e.g., circular, child has two parents in the same tree, etc.). Consequently, there is always room for improvement in the field of data management.